CHAPTER ONE
KELSEY
HE SAT ALONE AT THE BAR, flipping a coin. His features were shadowed in the light. First he balanced the coin on his index finger, then he tossed it into the air with a flick of his thumb. The coin flashed quicksilver as it spun and dropped into his palm. He flipped it again. It was a rhythmic movement, hypnotic, like the ticking of a clock.
I watched him catch the coin, then let my gaze travel up his muscular arm. An elaborate tattoo curled around his upper right forearm and biceps, but from a distance I couldn’t make out the design.
His profile was sharply masculine, his jaw dark with stubble, his black hair thick and messy. He wore an old navy T-shirt and jeans that hugged his long legs. Though his shoulders were slumped, a tense, restless energy wound through his body, as if he were an eagle poised for flight.
As I watched him, something fluttered deep inside me. I knew men like him. He’d once been like the rough boys from my old Chicago neighborhood, the boys who radiated insolence and defiance. The ones who fought, cursed, and cut school to sneak behind buildings and smoke. The boys who dared each other to shoplift from the Russian shops on Devon Street. The boys who liked me because I was a tough girl who met their challenges without fear.
This guy was no longer a boy, though. Far from it. He was every inch a man, from the rugged planes of his face to his powerful torso and clear down to the scuffed, well-worn boots.
He flipped the coin again, closed his hand around it, and pushed it into his pocket. He grabbed the bottle resting on the counter and tilted his head back to drain the last of the beer. The column of his throat worked as he swallowed. I watched with mesmerized fascination, not missing a detail, from the curve of his hand around the bottle to the way his lips pressed against the top.
He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He turned. And through the smoky light and shadows, our gazes met.
Oh.
My heart flipped just like the coin—a wild, seamless spin flashing silver. I felt my heart suspend in mid-air for an instant, poised to drop, and I had the sudden, irrational sense that it, too, could fall right into the palm of his hand.
I tore my gaze from his and looked at my drink. The scotch reminded me what the hell I was even doing in a dingy bar on the outskirts of Forest Grove. The crushing disappointment of my entire day effectively pushed my heart back down into place. Or lower. My dark mood was also probably the reason I was thinking silly thoughts about a complete stranger.
I felt him approaching, his presence tangible. My breath grew shallow when I looked up again to find him right beside my booth. His gaze wandered over me, touching on my eyes behind my glasses, up to the dark blue streak in my blonde hair, then back over my face to my mouth.
God, he was such a man. Big and rough-hewn, but with thick-lashed eyes and black eyebrows that softened the planes of his face and made him downright handsome. I could feel the power radiating from him, could sense a purely male appraisal of me raking through his mind. My skin tingled. I saw what he saw—a professional woman in a tailored, gray business suit and silk blouse, drinking alone in a corner booth, as if she were just waiting for him to approach.
Maybe I had been. Though I had avoided men like him for years, at the moment he was a welcome distraction from the series of recent failures that had put my hard-won research project on the skids.
Frustration clawed at me again. I stifled it and tried to match his assessment of me by deliberately sweeping my eyes over his torso. I imagined the rigid muscles and planes of his abdomen beneath his T-shirt. I looked at the corded length of his forearms, the tattoos gliding over the biceps of his right arm—intricate feathers, like a bird’s wing—then back up to his face.
He watched me, a faint smile curving his well-shaped mouth, his gaze a force that I, Kelsey March who knew all about the physics of geomagnetic storms, couldn’t resist any more than I could resist the pull of gravity.
He dug a hand into his pocket and pulled out the coin. When he spoke, his voice was a smooth, deep rumble that settled in my core like a drumbeat.
“Heads… I leave,” he said. “Tails… I stay.”
I swallowed to ease the dryness in my throat. “Do you always let fate make decisions for you?”
“Fate makes better decisions than I do.”
I looked at the coin nestled in his broad hand. My pulse quickened. He balanced the coin on his index finger and flipped it with his thumb. We both watched the coin spin upward.
Tails. Tails. Tails.
Before I could think, I reached out and grabbed the coin out of the air. I closed my fist around it, the edges pressing against my palm. It felt larger than a quarter and heavier, like a silver dollar.
The stranger and I looked at each other. The air between us vibrated with something hot and anticipatory, a ripening awareness of which decision we both wanted fate to make.
Tails… I stay.
I tightened my grip on the coin. My heart hammered. I felt as if I were on the cusp of a free-falling drop, like the steep incline of a roller-coaster that would sweep me off on an exhilarating, wild ride. I met the man’s gaze again.
“You decide,” I said.
He didn’t move. I waited. The noise of the bar receded, leaving us alone together. Then he stepped forward and slid into the booth beside me.
My breath escaped in one, long rush. An undeniable sense of relief went through me, which was as unnerving as the fact that I’d wanted him to stay. I edged away only far enough to let him sit.
His hip brushed against mine. An electric spark shot over my skin. He rested his arms on the table, and like a magnet my eyes were drawn to his hard forearms, dusted with dark hair, and the elaborate bird’s wing that ended at the crook of his elbow.
I still held the coin, my hand curled into a fist. A faint dizziness filled my head. It wasn’t the alcohol. I’d been nursing my first drink for the past forty-five minutes, and the glass was still half-full. I’d also been watching him since he walked into the bar thirty minutes ago, which accounted for my lack of interest in the scotch. Just looking at him gave me a buzz.
“What are you doing here alone?” he asked.
“Seething,” I said.
“You don’t look like you’re seething.”
I knew I didn’t. The blue streak in my hair was the only thing that made people wonder—otherwise, they only saw a cool, professional woman. Even now, after five hours in a stuffy boardroom fielding questions and accusations from six male executives, I looked composed and unruffled. No one would ever know that an hour ago, I’d been locked in a stall in the ladies’ room, slamming my hand against the door and fighting waves of anger.
“What do I look like I’m doing?” I asked.
“You look like you’re checking me out.”
My heart jolted with a combination of embarrassment and pleasure. It was the truth. I’d been checking him out since he walked in the door. I’d watched him toss his leather jacket onto a coat rack before crossing to the bar. His stride had been long and certain, his movements decisive as he dug in his back pocket for his wallet and took a seat at the bar.
I liked the way he moved. I liked the way he handed the money directly to the bartender instead of putting it on the counter. I liked the way he nodded his thanks and took a drink, the way he rested one booted foot on the bar railing.
Hell. I liked everything about him. That was why I hadn’t stopped staring at him.
He moved closer to me now. I felt the length of his thigh next to mine. I wanted to press up against it, to feel his body heat and the solid bulk of his muscles. The dizziness wound through me again along with a sense of unreality, as if I were no longer smart, sharp Professor March, but a mysterious, sexy woman who picked up men in bars with uninhibited ease.
Men like him.
“What are you doing here alone?” I asked.
“Brooding,” he said.
I smiled. “You don’t look like you’re brooding.”
“I stopped when I saw you.”
Oh.
I hadn’t stopped seething when I saw him. My anger had just shifted into a slow, pleasurable burn that uncoiled in my blood like a plant stretching toward the sun.
He reached out to curl a few locks of my blue hair around his fingers. He studied the strands intently, as if he were making sure they really were blue and not just a trick of the light. When he smoothed them back into place, his fingers brushed across my forehead.
“Pretty,” he murmured.
A flush rose to my cheeks. Despite my knowledge that flirting was second nature to a man like him, I let myself be softened by his admiration. So much better than feeling as if I were clawing my way up a brick wall and falling back on my ass every time I made any progress.
“So what… or who… made you seethe?” he asked.
“A group of SciTech executives.”
“What’s SciTech?”
“A scientific research agency. They took away funding for a project I’ve been working on for three years.”
“Why did they do that?”
“They said my data was inconclusive.”
“Was it?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But I’m far from finished with it. I needed the funding renewal to conduct more investigations and move into phase two. But they shut down the whole project.”
Frustration churned inside me again, my brain crowding with raised voices, arguments, and my explosive anger that not one of the executives had understood or wanted to support what I was trying to do.
I reached for my scotch and took a swallow, letting the alcohol burn through my chest.
I felt him watching me again, this time with both curiosity and guardedness. As if he were trying to make sense of the woman with the dark blue hair and business suit who was fighting to fund her scientific research.
“What’s the project about?” he asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to relive the lengthy, combative meeting that had led to me sitting in a bar, badly needing a drink.
My stomach knotted. I didn’t want to be Professor March right now. Professor March was angry, frustrated, and exhausted. Tomorrow she’d have to face her colleagues and admit that SciTech pulled funding for the Spiral Project. She’d also have to contend with the fact that most of the other professors would be secretly pleased by her failure.
Then she’d have to talk to her grad students, deal with their disappointment, and start the proposal process all over again. After that she’d have to find out how this debacle affected her chances for tenure and a permanent, full professor position at King’s University.
Fuck.
I’d be Professor March again later. Not now. Not with this incredibly sexy man sitting so close to me, everything about him awakening desires that I’d suppressed for years. Desire for the forbidden, for bad boys who radiated danger, for risk-taking and spontaneity and the freedom to do whatever the hell I wanted.
I turned to face him at the same instant I shifted closer, pressing my thigh against his. Heat flowed through me.
“What were you brooding about?” I asked, skimming my gaze from his mouth up to his eyes.
“The fact that fate makes better decisions than I do.”
“But you decided to come over here,” I remarked.
You decided to stay.
He studied me. He had beautiful eyes. Framed by thick eyelashes, his eyes were dark as the earth, as midnight, and flecked with silver, like stars in an endless universe.
“Best decision I’ve made in a long time,” he said.
Pleasure unfurled in my veins. I was still holding the coin clenched in my left fist.
Emboldened by his words, I reached out and settled my other hand on his forearm. Awareness shivered through my blood at the sensation of his hair-roughened skin, the hard muscles taut with restrained energy. I ran my hand tentatively up to where the bird’s wing hugged his upper arm before disappearing beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt. I wondered how far it went, if tattoos also decorated the slopes of his shoulder and chest.
I loved that he wore a bird’s wing, that he’d made freedom a permanent part of him. I traced the feathers with the tip of my finger. A flame licked at me, flaring upward from my core and into my blood. I wanted to slide my hand beneath his sleeve and over his smooth, muscled shoulder.
I didn’t have the courage to do that. Once upon a time, I had. Not anymore. Instead I swept my hand back down to his forearm. Before I reached his wrist, he put his hand over mine. It was a quick, decisive movement, like a hawk landing on its perch. My pulse stuttered, a combination of heat and shock rolling through me as I realized he was about to make another decision.
And I would agree with whatever it was.
He slid his fingers against my hand, gently caressing the spaces between my fingers. Live electrical wires sparked through me. I’d never before known how tender those little hollows were.
He traced the backs of my fingers. His hands were callused. I could feel the hard ridges on his forefinger and thumb. A burn spread low in my belly. I gripped the coin tighter in my other fist. He leaned in, closer, and when his lips brushed mine, fireworks exploded in my blood in complete disproportion to the gentle pressure of his kiss.
My whole body sighed with pleasure. His lips were warm, slightly chapped, and he tasted like salt and maleness. Oh, how long had it been since I’d kissed a man like him—a man who reminded me of the excitement of risks and the reckless, heady feeling of plunging headlong into the unknown.
He put his hand against my cheek, his fingers sliding into my hair. I parted my lips to taste the heat of him. Our tongues touched. A bolt of lust shot to my center. My lower body tightened. I pressed my thighs together.
Oh, god.
So good. Hot and gentle at the same time. He shifted his lips to my cheek, his stubble abrading my skin. Beneath the table, he settled his other hand on my thigh. The warmth of his palm burned through the material of my trousers.
I shifted closer, letting my body lean into his as he stroked his hand upward, his fingers dipping between my thighs and higher… higher…
I groaned, aching to part my legs and let him touch me. I had a sudden, blatantly explicit image of him sliding his hand into my pants and finding the satin thong I wore under my business suit. Then twisting his fingers around the thin strap and down into my—
I broke away from him with a gasp, my chest burning. I stared into his darkened eyes as our breath filled the space between us. My lips felt reddened, my cheek scraped from his whiskers.
I tore my gaze from his and grabbed my drink. My mind spun. Desire and caution rocketed through me like crazed fireflies.
I could leave with him. I could leave with him right this second, and let him take me somewhere, anywhere. I could let him strip off my clothes, touch and kiss me all over, make me writhe against his hard, powerful body…
I downed a swallow of scotch, but the alcohol did nothing to quench my raging fire. His hand, warm and possessive, settled on the back of my neck. He brushed his lips against my ear.
Behind him, the bar patrons moved almost in slow-motion, their images blurred. A group of men pushed through the front door, letting in a sudden burst of chatter that sliced through my haze of lust.
I went still. My vision sharpened and focused. A chill crept into my blood. Five men in their mid-thirties, wearing khakis and ties, one with a rumpled suit jacket and glasses…
They crowded up to the bar and called out their orders. I stared at them, my heart plummeting. They weren’t SciTech executives, but they might as well have been.
The man beside me had stilled too. I felt him watching me, as if he sensed the frost that had descended over my desire. The reminder of who I was pushed back into my head.
I’d once been a girl who took risks and met challenges without fear, but that girl had been gone for more years than I cared to remember.
I was Professor March. Even when I didn’t want to be, I still was.
I swallowed hard. My fingernails dug into my palm. The coin was still clenched in my damp fist.
I held out my hand. My breathing grew shallow. Slowly I uncurled my fingers. We both looked at the coin, the silver flashing in the overhead light.
Heads.
Disappointment stabbed me. I dropped the coin into his hand. It was a facsimile coin, vaguely medieval-looking. When I lifted my gaze to his face again, he was watching me with a shuttered expression, as if he knew that this time, fate had made the decision.
He shoved the coin into his pocket and stood. For an instant, he seemed to hesitate. My heart stirred again. Then he turned and walked away.
The noise of the bar filled my ears. Frustration rose in my chest. A blinking neon light flashed garishly through the window. As the world crashed back in, my regret became so bitter I could taste it.
Several people sat at the computers in the cramped synoptic lab of the Meteorology department at King’s University. The smell of bad coffee and the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards filled the air.
I rubbed the back of my neck, twisting to ease the tension in my shoulders. My muscles were still tight, both with lingering anger over yesterday’s meeting with SciTech and—I could now admit in the harsh light of day—sexual frustration at having thwarted that hot encounter with a stranger.
Intellectually, I knew I’d done the right thing by putting a stop to it. But my body didn’t give a shit about intellect. It was just remembering how damn good that kiss had felt. Sparks and electricity. The smoldering burn of lust. The world slipping away, everything fading into the pressure of his mouth and the touch of his hand on my—
“This is pathetic.” My grad student Derek made a noise of irritation.
I forced myself back to the present and focused on the NEXRAD screen. Derek hit the refresh button on the radial velocity loop for the third time. His face darkened with a frown.
“This department really needs upgraded equipment,” he muttered.
“We’re working on it,” I said. “The board of trustees has yet to approve our budget proposal.”
I leaned over to start up the mesonet page as we watched the storm encroaching on northeast Oklahoma. Three of my other grad students had left two nights ago to chase developing storms, which had the potential to grow into tornadic supercells. When they returned, I would tell all my students together about the disaster of the Spiral Project funding.
The phone beside the computer rang. I pressed the talk button to connect it to the speaker. “Colton?”
“Yeah.” His voice crackled over the line. “We’re on I-540 heading toward Fayetteville. Whaddya got?”
“We’re looking at the mesonet observations,” I said. “There’s a convergence in Muskogee, moving east at five knots.”
“Initiation?”
“At 19Z.”
“Based on the shear profile, the storm splitting should happen half an hour later,” Derek told him. “Right-mover dominant not long after that.”
“Okay. Hold on.” There was a pause. “We’re switching directions now. Be in touch.”
I disconnected the line and sat next to Derek. We spent the next hour watching the evolution of the storm on the OKC NEXRAD. Colton and the team got in front of the developing supercell and called again to report a massive wall cloud.
A few seconds later, my cell phone buzzed with a text from Colton. Below the words holy shit was a picture of a huge black-and-gray mass extending from the base of the cumulonimbus cloud.
I nudged Derek and showed him the picture. He breathed out a curse. I knew how he felt because I felt it too—envy, excitement, and fear that my students were possibly in the path of a forming tornado.
I tried to ignore the envy part. Envy meant wanting something you didn’t have, and I’d long ago stopped wanting to be in a storm.
Never mind that one had brewed inside me just last night as I sat beside a man who made my skin tingle with his touch. A man with corded forearms and long, powerful legs, sandpaper stubble that branded my skin like—
Stop. Thinking. About. Him.
I shook my head to dislodge the memories. I was Professor Kelsey March again, which meant I had no business wondering where that sizzling, anonymous encounter would have gone if I hadn’t come to my senses.
Trying to refocus, I watched the radar and mesonet. Colton called again after another half hour to report that the storm had weakened and dissipated.
“You all okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. We got some hail damage, but the equipment is fine. We’re heading back to Tulsa now. I’ll send you the reports soon.”
“You’re staying overnight, right?”
“Luke wants to drive back after we get something to eat.”
“No. You find a motel, okay? Drive back tomorrow morning after you’ve all slept. Use my credit card. Tell Luke that’s an order.”
“Can we use your credit card for a steak dinner?”
“Go ahead. Just don’t get hammered.”
“No, ma’am. See you in a day or two.”
“Be careful.”
After Derek and I speculated about the reasons for the storm’s dissipation, I grabbed my blazer and turned to leave the lab. I almost bumped into a tall, broad-shouldered man who was standing right behind us.
“Shouldn’t your grad students be here working?” Stan Baxter asked.
“I told them they could go.”
“You shouldn’t be using departmental resources to chase tornados,” he said. “We’re overextended with our equipment as it is.”
“Derek and I were just helping them track it. We’re done now.”
Stan glanced behind me to the radar screen. He was an older guy, hefty and gray-haired, who’d been a full professor in the Meteorology department for the past thirty years and had been appointed the departmental chairperson last September. He’d always been respectful toward me, but lately he’d been on my case over my failure with the Spiral Project and my conduct as a professor up for tenure.
“How is your tenure review package coming along?” Stan asked me.
Irritation pricked my spine. He knew I was behind schedule in compiling a binder of my academic distinctions to present to the university board. And now I had to admit to the board that SciTech had pulled my Spiral Project funding.
I pushed past Stan and walked out of the lab, not wanting to have this conversation in front of a graduate student. Stan fell into step beside me in the corridor.
“You know, Kelsey, I’d suggest you write up a statement of commitment to present to the review board and chancellor,” he said.
“What do you mean, statement of commitment?”
“Commitment to teaching a full course load,” Stan said. “I was looking at your teaching schedule for the past few years, and you’ve managed to avoid teaching classes in favor of your personal research projects. That’s not a fulfillment of the workload clause in your contract.”
“I haven’t avoided anything,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “I’ve been working on the Spiral Project for three years. The scope of the project required a massive amount of data collection that—”
“Look.” Stan held up his hands to stop me. “I get that the Spiral Project was your baby. But you’re up for tenure, Kelsey. If I were you, I’d consider it a blessing in disguise that SciTech killed your funding. Now you can focus on fulfilling your contractual duties and proving your commitment to this university.”
My shoulders tensed. I didn’t like his implication that I was slacking. But he knew I couldn’t cause any waves or risk tenure. Hell, he was one of the professors who had to approve my application.
All of my colleagues in the Meteorology department had to agree that I deserved tenure before the university board and the chancellor made the final decision. If my colleagues or the chancellor voted no, my career at King’s was over.
“Now you suddenly think I’m not committed to King’s?” I asked. “After seven years?”
“You haven’t even taught your intro courses for two years,” Stan pointed out. “You’ve been too busy with the Spiral Project. Now that it’s clear you haven’t been able to prove you can better predict tornados, you need to kill your project and focus on King’s agenda rather than your own.”
“I’m not giving up on the Spiral Project, Stan.” No fucking way.
He frowned. “Not even if it puts your tenure at risk?”
“I wasn’t aware I had to choose between tenure and the project.”
“You need to decide if you want to remain a strong asset to this department,” Stan said, “or if you want to run around chasing tornados.”
Maybe I should flip a coin and let fate decide.
Heat rose up my neck. Memories of my stranger filled me—how he’d tasted like salt, the pressure of his hand, the way his thigh pressed against mine…
I shook off the thoughts and straightened my shoulders.
“That sounds like a threat,” I told Stan.
“It’s a warning. For the past six months, the university review board has approved every stage of your application for tenure. The final decision is in four weeks. If it goes your way, you’ll be guaranteed a permanent position at King’s. If it doesn’t…”
His voice trailed off.
You’re fired.
And I had no hope of getting the Spiral Project off the ground again if I were fired from King’s University and lost all association to an institution.
Shit. I had to play by the rules, much as I hated them.
“Okay,” I finally agreed. “I’ll write a statement of commitment.”
“Good.” Stan nodded with satisfaction. “The Spiral Project can’t be your focus, Kelsey. In fact, I’d suggest you find another project that actually has some conclusive data to support it. You don’t want to get a reputation as a fraud. No agency will want to fund your proposals then, tenure or not.”
I forced myself to walk away before I said something that would come back to bite me on the ass.